Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.
…..
Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits loved ones, reminisces about his college love, and disgorges thoughts that will remind you of people who got 800s on their SATs but never learned how to tell a joke with their friends.
This is the third Richard Powers’ novel I’ve read. I doubt there’s a novelist out there who I admire more for the ambition of his fiction. I want to love him. I also want to un-torture his story-telling. In an asymptotic way, I see clearly where he wants to go. But in the end he seems to sacrifice story for lofty concept.
I am especially disheartened that I could not finish Orfeo because he weaves music into his prose. I love this! I try to do this with my writing. And damn him, he selects works that are high on my list of all-time faves, like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Mind you, he doesn’t just refer to these works, or have characters listen to them or talk about them. They are stitched into the text as if you are following the score in parallel with reading the story.
Powers’ doesn’t stop with music. He integrates scientific, engineering, environmental, medical, literature, and just about every other academic discipline into this prose too. If I pulled a passage out to illustrate, I’d have to type ten pages.
Instead, here’s Powers’ on pot:
“Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els [main character] was after something more solid, a priori, shared–durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners.”
I spent many late nights stoned in my dorm room in college, having edge-of-the-universe conversations with friends. The difference must be that Powers’ went back to his dorm room and recorded all of his. I just crashed.
About a third of the way through the book, Powers’ takes a detour and dwells on this favorite work of mine, Quartet for the End of Time. This is what probably kept me plugging away through the second third, after which I quit. I mean, how many times are writers told, “show, don’t tell?” Between pages 106-121, Powers’ gives us a history lesson on the circumstances surrounding Messiaen’s composing this work in a gulag in France. Okay, he seemingly gets away with it because Els is delivering a lecture to his students. But still. It’s a great story, a heartbreaking story, but in this context, pretty dry stuff, and I suspect it only “moves the story along” if you know and love Messiaen’s work, or you can run down the hall and have a eureka moment with a music humanities professor.
Powers’ is in that league with Pynchon, William Gass, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and I suppose, Faulkner, Joyce, and others, who are praised for their ambition and scope and audacious intentions, usually by people who make a living off of teaching such novels to students, reminding us how complex but important they are, and making the rest of us feel like Charlie Brown when he is asked by Lucy and Linus what he sees in the clouds. “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckie,” he says, after Linus woos and waxes philosophically.
I wrote the word asymptotically earlier, because one, I love this word, but two, it perfectly describes Powers’ in relation to some of the others in this league. An asymptote is the limit of a curve that is plateauing. Over the course of the x- or y-axis on a graph, the curve approaches the asymptote but never reaches it as the variable goes to infinity. It’s like seeing the goal posts or home plate but never getting there. I guess the fact that I use a word like asymptote tells you I feel a kindred spirit to Powers. Maybe that’s part of my issue. Envy. But I digress. The difference with Powers, say, and the others in his league, is that I see where he is going. I know where the goal posts are when I read his stuff. I don’t lose my bearings because I have context in the three-dimensional plane (unlike Faulkner, early Pynchon, Gass, etc, where I generally have no ideas what’s really going on.). BUT, I am too frustrated, exhausted, and annoyed. I want to punish him by not finishing. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I wish the guy would focus on little
Don’t get me wrong, I love complex stories, ambition, and a literary challenge. But if a horsey and duckie aren’t in there somewhere, I have to wonder whether the intention is to leave a lasting impression in the halls of academia (and The New Yorker) or an enriching (even if challenging) experience with your audience.
As a postscript, several people have told me that The Goldbug Variations is his best novel. I will probably give that one a go if I live long enough. Because I really do want to love this guy.
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